Can America’s Descent Possibly Be Reversed?

March 30, 2012

Copyright © 2012 by LewRockwell.com (Link to article)

My articles for LRC have been increasingly difficult and frustrating to write. More recently I have been trying to get people to understand America’s current police state. Yes, I have received some favorable emails when my articles have appeared, but there are also ones from those in denial, who refer to me as “nuts,” “conspiracy theorist,” and so on.

Now, to say that America is becoming like Nazi Germany is not an exaggeration. But too many people glance over such assertions in disbelief, perceiving such things as absurdities. They are in denial, and just do not want to believe what’s going on.

In my article on martial law, I emphasized that public officials are obligated to disobey unlawful orders, even those issued by the President of the United States. If the President orders suspension of civil liberties and basic rights protected by the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, then governors, mayors, state troopers, police officers and military personnel must disobey those unlawful orders. Those officials have sworn to an oath to obey the Constitution, not to obey the President of the United States.

“But we’re at war!” some people cry. No, sorry. Regardless of what the warmongers say, there is no time ever to excuse violations of the people’s rights and their liberty, during war or peacetime.

America is dangerous now, but the reason isn’t because of Islamic terrorists – it’s because of government bureaucrats, central planners run amok.

The problem is that bureaucrats who MUST have war and expanded powers, including suppression of civil liberties, will change the laws to suit their narcissistic needs for more power.

And America is dangerous because too many amongst the general population are no longer raised with a sense of moral values and personal responsibility. Americans seem to get easily swept up into a national fervor for war, for killing and death. Just look at these past ten years of destruction that our government has caused overseas, and the American people’s passive acceptance of it based on the government’s emotion-driven propaganda.

One item of evidence of America’s decline in decency and values is how America’s youngsters are so bloodthirstily drawn to the latest pop culture phenomenon called The Hunger Games, #1 on Amazon.com this week. Because of modern Americans’ craving for war and sadism, and because of their widespread support for the Bush-Obama wars of the past decade, Americans have become even more desensitized to violence.

But this series of books supposedly has an anti-war tone or message. However, I wonder how many people who have read the books (or have seen the movie) are more “anti-war” than they were previously.

In continuing their apparent militantly exceptionalist attitude, and with much ignorance as well (especially of Muslims), many Americans now seem to have an insatiable craving for violence, sadism, cruelty, torture, murder, blood and death.

Fifty or sixty years ago, when America was perhaps a little more decent and moral in general than it is now, in no way would so many parents have let their kids see this movie or read the books.

Like The Hunger Games, America has a corrupt, degenerate central government that has grown into a monstrous Leviathan, consisting of professional bureaucrats and politicians who seem to delight in pitting one group of Americans against another, with class warfare and governmental-provocation of racial conflicts, and struggles between police and civilians. It is as though Washington’s political class wants to see conflicts between armed government agents and everyday civilians, via the drug war, the “war on terror,” and thousands and thousands of needless regulations and laws that could cause the most innocent amongst us to be on the receiving end of a criminal S.W.A.T. team raid.

And now, Barack Obama is taking full advantage of the post-9/11 police state apparatus that the Bush-Cheney Administration set up. This is being used, in the name of “keeping us safe” and along with the massively intrusive ObamaCare in the name of “keeping us healthy and insured,” to gain even more control over the people’s lives, their fortunes, their businesses, associations and contracts.

Recent Unconstitutional Acts by Barack Obama and Congress:

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) gives the President the power to have the military arrest and detain indefinitely anyone the president says is a “terrorist,” or a “terrorist supporter,” without providing any evidence against the accused.

NDAA is a clear and present danger to American liberty, a codification of dictatorship, and a treasonous act of turning the U.S. military against the people. And it is the reason why author Chris Hedges is suing Barack Obama.

Some legislators are claiming that they weren’t aware that in NDAA they voted for such removal of due process of Americans, but in fact, they knew exactly what they were doing.

And just recently, Attorney General Eric Holder defended the President’s self-granted power to assassinate Americans based on the President’s own judgment of guilt, without due process, without presenting any evidence of any kind.

But every human being who is accused of something has an inherent right to require that the accuser show evidence to prove such alleged guilt. No circumstances are too important – not wars, terrorism, and not economic collapse – that the government or Presidents be relieved of their burden to show evidence against the accused.

Infowars.com recently compared these Washington policies to similar police state policies of Chile’s dictator General Augusto Pinochet during the 1970s. The NDAA law could now be considered as Washington’s reactionary and desperate response to political dissent and economic collapse.

Obama’s most recent extreme overreach was his signing the Executive Order, the National Defense Resources Preparedness (NDRP) order, which gives the President complete control over all resources within the U.S. territory including water and agriculture, energy, transportation and food, during war or emergency. But this revised version gives the President such supreme powers in peacetime.

In this new example of totalitarianism the President also seizes control over the nation’s labor forces, and it is not merely a demand to conscript Americans into the military, but to conscript Americans to serve in other non-military labor capacities, and during peacetime as well. (Hmmm. Sounds a little like communism, if you ask me.)

And with the FEMA camps, there is plenty of evidence that the U.S. government either foresees or is planning for some sort of catastrophic event, economic collapse, or civil unrest. In an intensive investigation by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and Alex Jones, the investigators found one “residential center” (video here [no longer available]), with locked doors, barbed wire fencing facing the inside of the property, and a children’s playground. Officials at the center refused to give information about what the place was for. Investigators also found stacks of hundreds of thousands of coffins and plans for mass graves. Investigators found plenty of evidence that camps and rendition sites are to be used to deal with possible massive political dissent in America. (more here, here, here, here, and here)

Analysis

No doubt many readers dismiss all this as “conspiracy theory,” and FEMA probably has its explanations such as preparations for possible biological warfare, mass epidemics, and so forth. (And we all know, after Katrina, just how competent FEMA is in managing disasters.) That all these acts by federal U.S. government bureaucrats – NDAA, NDRP, the power to detain or assassinate Americans without showing evidence against the accused, the FEMA camps and prison-like facilities – could actually be meant for devious purposes by political power-grabbers is something that most people just would not want to acknowledge. The thought that the U.S. government and U.S. military could be designating the American people as the enemy is a frightening thought.

Now, some people believe that Obama is using his new military dictatorship and detainment camps on behalf of various left-wing groups, such as the Weather Underground, to “transform America” into communist rule. But many of these police state policies and Homeland Security intrusions were begun by the Bush Administration and even by previous administrations, such as Jimmy Carter who first signed FEMA into existence, and the Reagan Administration that included Oliver North acting out of the White House basement and who eagerly called for martial law at the drop of a hat.

However, we also have seen testimony from the 1970s by an FBI agent who infiltrated the Weather Underground, and who described how academic types such as Bill Ayers were allegedly plotting to bring down the U.S. government to make way for foreign communist regimes to occupy America, and that resisters and dissenters would be “eliminated.” Here is a brief video of the FBI agent’s descriptions:

Now, here is what I would say if I were really conspiratorial: I would suggest that the neocons’ aggressions overseas, with invasions and occupations, sanctions, and destroying Muslim countries to create blowback against America and to expand U.S. governmental powers abroad and at home, were to intentionally weaken America’s security and economy to help those leftist organizations. But I’m not saying that. (Although, those incompetent neocon central planners sure have been useful idiots for those leftists, at the very least).

But then, there really could be reason to suspect the neocon architects who screwed up the Middle East as having possible communist sympathies, given that several founding members of the neoconservative movement had been unapologetic “former” Trotskyites who seemed just as devoted to spreading their vision globally as were the communists.

These Cheney-Wolfowitz-Kristol neoconservatives are certainly not “conservative.” Their policies are fascist, with their passion for coveting the wealth and natural resources of foreigners and seizing control over so much property and resources in their own country.

But in my opinion, fascism is really communism with a mere façade of “private property.” Like the communists (and the Nazis), the neocons have been invading country after country (as has been their plan, especially in the Middle East), some covertly. Since 1990 the invasions and occupations have been more overt and for the purpose of expanding U.S. government bureaucracies and military and for U.S. government hegemony worldwide. (Hmmm. They sound like communists to me.)

Ben O’Neill’s recent article on the West’s economic structure tells us of the government-corporate complex, the breakdown of the rule of law, and how the political elites strive to maintain and strengthen their political and police powers at all costs.

The one major commonality between the neoconservatives and the Obama leftists is that both groups love central planning. But it is central planning that has been the cause for much of the destruction of modern civilization, in the Soviet Union, the current European Union and the United States. The left and the neocons have their utopian views of the ideal society, both being authoritarian, with total government control over the people.

As O’Neill points out, the central planning elites use war and conquest to foment nationalist fervor from the masses to get them to passively accept the elites’ massive intrusions, predations and crimes against them. The latest hysteria is the rush to war with Iran, based on propaganda that the government spoon-feeds the masses, despite Iran’s being completely surrounded by U.S. military bases and Israel having hundreds of nukes.

Obama has taken on the neocons’ warmongering abroad and domestic police state, combined with his seizing control over just about every aspect of daily life in America (e.g. ObamaCare). Now many Americans are leaving the country in droves, even though the government has been making it difficult for the people to leave, just as it was with the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

This East German-born woman describes how the communists took everything away from the people and attempted to indoctrinate them to love the communist State. America was not meant to be this way.

Conclusion

The way out of this is to accept the fact that compulsory central planning leads to tyranny, and that we must decentralize America in order to save it. The Soviet Union learned the hard way.

But at least some states are trying to defend themselves from federal tyranny through nullification, of ObamaCare, and now of the NDAA law especially. So at least there’s some hope. (In this video, Hans-Hermann Hoppe explains the dangers of centralization and the advantages of small states.)

In our current situation of de facto martial law, now is a good time to remind governors, mayors, police, national guardsmen and military that any federal orders to arrest or detain Americans without charges or evidence, any suspension of one’s civil liberties and right to due process, are unlawful orders that military, state and local officials are obligated to disobey. If you know you have done nothing wrong, you have a right to defend yourself against unlawful arrest or detainment, and a right to resist being brought against your will to rendition camps.

Some Misc. Thoughts (Warning: Some Political Incorrectness)

I’m really getting sick of all this.

Controversial TV personality Bill Maher donated $1 million to an Obama for reelection PAC. Many are in an uproar at the hypocrisy of Maher who referred to Sarah Palin as a c-word among other insults, while Rush Limbaugh was pressured to apologize to a Catholic university law student for referring to her as a “slut.”

But, in my opinion, here is what Maher has done: Bill Maher has now financially endorsed the continued daily Obama-drone murders of innocent civilians overseas. Bill Maher has spent 1 million dollars in his endorsement of the NDAA law that gives Obama the power to have the military arrest and detain indefinitely any American Obama says is a “terrorist” or a “terrorist supporter,” even without any evidence to prove it. And Bill Maher has, of course, endorsed and paid for Obama’s power to murder anyone he calls a “terrorist” anywhere in the world, including Americans, including in their own homes, without showing any evidence to prove it.

Jim Davies has this piece at Strike the Root on the “God Question,” that links back to a previous article at that website. I think that Jim Davies might be one of those types who has the assumption that no god or creator exists (and my reference to God is as Creator). I have tried to make the point that, if you want evidence to show that a creator exists that created life then you can look in the mirror.

We really have two choices, in my opinion: Either we were created by some being of higher intelligence (yes, I know that we evolved from earlier forms, but I believe we were still created), or life as we come to understand it just happened to occur through random matter and particles just happening to come together to form such complex things as our heart and circulatory system, our brain and eyes and optic nerve, and concepts such as consciousness and thought and emotions. Do you really want to suggest that such complex things just happened to come to be out of total randomness and spontaneity? Well, to believe that would have to be out of faith, given the odds against it.

Aside from that, I don’t think it is constructive to ridicule people who believe in God or Creator, or to ridicule someone who believes there is no god and no creator. And I don’t particularly view my above assertions as out of any religious beliefs, because I am not particularly religious. In fact, to this day, I can’t understand how so many people still take the Bible as “The Word.” In my opinion, as I have noted here, the reason we have many decades of conflicts now associated with Israel is because of the Christian Zionists’, the Jewish Zionists’ and the Political Zionists’ century-long insistence that Israel or Palestine and ONLY that one territory MUST be the place for Jews worldwide, and based solely on their Bible, and for no other reason.

Sibel Edmonds has this post asserting that the black population in America would be up in arms over Obama’s re-colonization of Africa were he a white president doing it. I agree with that. Thanks to America’s government-controlled schools, and the imbeciles they produce, most Americans — black, white, and all points between — are clueless.

Electing a black president, the 1964-65 Civil Rights Act, Affirmative Action, and other race-based laws and programs have done nothing good for race relations in the U.S. In 2008, Obomber had no record of achievement, but was good at reading off a teleprompter. Many people voted for him just because he was black, and they said so publicly. As long as each generation continues to pass along a collectivist way of thinking, this ignorance, this crap, will never end.

Racism is of collectivism. But America was founded on principles associated with individualism, individual freedom and individual rights. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said we should view people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Obama is someone of low-class character, and I’m not afraid to say it, just as George W. Bush is of low-class character. Anyone who STARTS a war is of the lowest, criminal class in my opinion. Starting wars against others, initiating war of aggression where YOU are the aggressor, is evil and is the beginning of new problems that beget even more problems. Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Only evil, imbecilic morons START wars! And they don’t really think in the long-term of possible or likely consequences. For example, Benjamin Netanyahu (a.k.a. Nutty-Yahoo) will probably START a war on Iran, for no good reason, which will result in much blowback against Israel by Iran and/or the surrounding Muslim countries who will attack Israel on behalf of their fellow Muslims in Iran.

Many people have asserted that TPTB want there to be race riots in America with the chaos that an economic or societal collapse could bring about. TPTB want black people to blame white people, they want white people to blame black people, they want a war on immigrants, and they want what may be an increasing war between government/police and civilians. Anything to “Divide and Conquer.” TPTB want America to destroy itself as a nation, and then say that the “freedom experiment” didn’t work, and that multiculturalism and the “melting pot” don’t work. (And Bill Maher is funding all this with his waste of $1 million!)

The real cause of society’s problems has been the State, its aggressions against civilians, and its interferences in the people’s private, personal and economic lives. The problems of society will never end until you have real freedom, where all associations, relationships and contracts are voluntary, and coercion, force, and aggression are not allowed. A civilized, healthy and prosperous society will be one in which no individual may be permitted to be above the law, and there are otherwise no restrictions on anyone’s life as long as they do not initiate aggression against others. And that includes NO MONOPOLY by anyone in territorial protection or in community policing and security.

Another Chapter in the Story of Government Criminality

Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (a.k.a. “Blago”) is now going to a federal prison in Colorado, for his conviction of attempting to sell or trade Barack Obama’s old U.S. Senate seat in exchange for cash or some high political appointment.

At the first trial, Blago was convicted of 1 count out of 24 counts against him, that of lying to the FBI. The prosecutors held a second trial, and at that trial he was then convicted of 17 of the charges related to the senate seat and related to extortion of state funds. Prior to the trials, Kevin Gutzman, author of James Madison and the Making of America, believed that federal prosecutor based the charges on a corruption of language related to the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Between the two trials, Allan Stevo thought that Blago should sue the feds for defaming him.

And well known civil liberties attorney Harvey Silverglate, author of Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, added, in a more honest assessment of what our “justice” system has become (or perhaps always was),

It is only because of the nature of the instructions given to the jury by the trial judge as to the meaning of what is essentially a meaningless statute, the leeway given to prosecutors to make arguments to the jury that seek to criminalize politics-as-usual, and the failure of appellate courts to rein in the abusive uses of vague statutes, that Rod Blagojevich can be convicted for doing what just about any other political figure does from time to time.

And Becky Akers, columnist for LewRockwell.com, had been perhaps the most succinct in her observations:

Show me the politician who doesn’t swap favors and peddle influence as tirelessly as normal people breathe.

Despite the preening of Blago’s smug prosecutor, self-righteous judge and the State’s cheerleaders in the media, condemning the poor slob to 14 years’ imprisonment is equivalent to exterminating one rat out of the millions spreading plague in medieval Europe: it’s the teeniest, tiniest start on curing what ails us. Judge James Zagel should round up the rest of the elected or appointed leeches and herd them off to the pokey, too, then follow and lock the door behind himself.

As I’ve noted many times now, the whole system of compulsory government and our very communistic State ownership of the entire territory and State monopoly of territorial protection and the administration of justice — which is a flawed system and doomed to crash and burn — what we get are prosecutions based on politics and political cronyism and favoritism and not based on actual justice. Besides questionably criminal offenses by merely corrupt pols, the feds now are also going after totally innocent civilians who are minding their own business and trying to peacefully go about their everyday lives. The feds are the criminals now.

Western Governments: Symbols of Advanced Human Civilization

Many thanks now to the U.S. government’s “War on Terror,” the excuse for bureaucrats to further expand an already bloated federal government for the sake of power grabs of the elites and not anything to do with protecting 300 million Americans from terrorism. We now live in a banana republic dictatorship, in which the President may arrest and detain indefinitely, or murder anyone he wants and for any reason, without being required to show any evidence against the accused. Those who criticize the imbeciles of government and those who dissent from the Establishment Rule are being targeted. They must be silenced.

Speech and the freedom to express one’s views, even those that a majority of people perceive to be loathsome views, are no longer rights as protected by the First Amendment. The American culture’s modern phenomenon of political correctness, in which the littlest comment might offend someone and is therefore to be suppressed or punished, is a side effect of the government’s increasing war on dissent and criticism of the Regime.

In his column today, Andrew Napolitano asks, Can the Secret Service Tell You to Shut Up?  This is in reference to the bill passed in Congress and signed into law by Herr Obama to allow the Secret Service to, according to The Judge, “designate any place they wish as a place where free speech, association and petition of the government are prohibited. And it permits the Secret Service to make these determinations based on the content of speech.” (Why didn’t Rand Paul vote against this totalitarian crap? Just asking.)

And in the People’s Republic of the U.K., a young, presumably Muslim guy was arrested and charged with “racially aggravated public-order offense,” for his angry tirade on a Facebook page. The kid expressed anger at the attention that British soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan received, whereas no one seems to notice the innocent families, the women and children murdered in Afghanistan on a daily basis. His language may have been “abusive,” and the government is concentrating on the alleged racial aspects of his tirade (which don’t exist), just because the kid is brown-skinned and the soldiers were white. And the media attention this is getting in U.K. seems to be concentrating on that racial tension as well. But this is really another in the governments’ war on free speech and the right to criticize the government and its crimes against innocents.

Governments initiate aggressions against its own people, against foreigners on other territories, and the bigger and more powerful the regime (such as the U.S.) the more intrusive, aggressive, brutal, dictatorial, repressive and murderous it will be. It is a natural consequence of allowing some people — government bureaucrats, police, soldiers — to be above the law, the same law, the rule of law, that all other non-government subjects must obey and follow.

In the “War on Terror,” the government has also been cracking down on the investigation and reporting on the illicit actions of the government. Governments and their bureaucrats especially do not want to allow journalists to uncover and expose the crimes of these governments, so they will expand their dictates against speech, the Press, and investigations.

One latest act of suppression of the Press by Herr Obama, according to Glenn Greenwald, has been Obama’s personal role in the imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist who helped to uncover that it was the U.S. military under Obama’s direction, and not the Yemeni military, that launched a drone attack that murdered many women and children (and not “militants”), as the State’s stenographers including the New York Times erroneously reported. Obama is cracking down on those reporters who dare to uncover the truth about who is doing what and to whom.

Meanwhile, the Left and progressives are silent as far as criticizing Obama is concerned, as opposed to their outrage at George W. Bush, even though Obama’s crimes have been more egregious. The Left have been intentionally suppressing the truth about Obama, as Conor Friedersdorf pointed out this week.

Ans as the Obama Administration continues to prosecute people for providing “material support” to terrorists, Glenn Greenwald also notes that Washington is filled with very influential hacks and elite bum-kissers who themselves are apparent terrorist-supporters in their cahoots with the Iranian group, MEK, or Mojahedin-e Khalq. Meanwhile, Obama and his minions continue to terrorize Americans at airports, on the highways with VIPR teams, federal S.W.A.T raids on innocent raw milk producers and farmers who provide actual food for their neighbors. And Obama and his minions continue to terrorize and murder innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and probably soon Syrians and Iranians.

But we better crack down on those who protest government encroachments, abuses, and violence. We better suppress speech of those with whom we disagree. Such as abortion protesters. According to this article, the pro-abortion crowd doesn’t like seeing protesters who are pro-life. So those who protest the murders of innocent unborn human beings, and those who protest the murders of innocent foreigners are to be silenced, arrested, and imprisoned.

My, how our society has advanced and progressed. A pro-death, anti-life society.

A recent poll asked people if they thought Obama was a Muslim. Many people thought so. The truth is, Obama is neither Muslim nor Christian. He is a statist. He, like millions and millions of Americans (and Brits, Chinese, Iranians, and more), worships the State. The State is their god. Don’t you dare go against the State. Don’t you dare question or criticize the State. And, God forbid, don’t even think about uncovering actual evidence of the crimes of the State, or you’ll be punished. Just ask Bradley Manning.

Private Businesses Have a Right to Establish Own Rules and Dress Codes

The British government bureaucrats say that people don’t have a right to wear a cross or crucifix at work, and two workers have taken them to court. However, it doesn’t seem that anyone is mentioning the real issue here. You have a right to free expression of your religion, of course, but not on someone else’s property or at a place of employment which is privately owned by someone else. The owner of the company has a private property right to establish whatever rules that apply to employees, and if the employees or prospective employees don’t like the rules, they should be free to go work somewhere else.

That case is totally different when a place of employment is publicly owned, however. In that case, it gets more complicated, in which, if an entity is publicly owned, everone has a right to express oneself in whatever way they wish. And that is another good reason why property, businesses and so forth should not be publicly owned.

A completely different situation is when the government establishes rules for everyone in society, other than just basic laws that should be absolute: No physical aggression except in self-defense, no theft or fraud, no trespassing. But if the government were to pass a law that said, “You can’t wear a cross” or, in the case of the fascist French government,  an Islamic headscarf, that is definitely a violation of the individual’s right to practice or express one’s religious beliefs in public.

On Questioning Zionism and Present-Day Israel-Related Views

Israel is unfortunately one of those taboo subjects that you may not talk honestly about in the current age of Politically Correct Intolerance. You especially may not speak critically of Israel or the Israeli government, or else be referred to as “anti-Semite” or “anti-Jewish,” or, in my case, “self-hating Jew.” Utter the words “Zionism” or “Zionist” and you’re a “conspiracy theorist.”

It is like how some people would call someone a racist for criticizing Barack Obama just because he’s black, despite his obvious incompetence, corruption and crimes against the people. And you are not permitted to look at the American “Civil War” with skepticism or criticize the racist Abraham Lincoln or you will be called “racist” or “pro-slavery.”

A further example, regarding Israel, note how the buffoons of the United States Congress stood and applauded and cheered for each and every syllable uttered by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Totally disingenuous old farts. (Except for Ron Paul, of course, who actually wants all Israelis, Jews, Arabs, Muslims, etc. to have their freedom, and believes that their rights ought not be restricted as they are in Israel, just as they are here in the USSA.) Many of these Congresspeople are subservient to the Israel Lobby, and receive a lot of money in campaign contributions from pro-Israel organizations. The most powerful and influential pro-Israel organization is AIPAC, The American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Just to clarify, as I wrote previously, the “Israel Lobby” is not any singular organization with some particular leader in charge. The “Israel Lobby” mainly refers to unconnected groups, organizations, lobbyists and fund-raisers for Israel. Two of the most prominent organizations are the ADL and AIPAC. There’s no “Zionist conspiracy.” There is no single organization called “The Israel Lobby,” but that is how these unconnected groups may informally but accurately be described.

Now, the most recent cases of intolerance of speech regarding Israel include Alan Dershowitz (of all people!), who is going on a crusade to get MJ Rosenberg of Media Matters fired, for Rosenberg’s outspoken views on Israel, his views against war with Iran, and his use of the term “Israel Firster.” Some people can’t face the fact that there actually are those who view Israel as of primary importance and who view the U.S. as secondary.

AIPAC pushes for war with Iran, a country that has not attacked the U.S. or Israel, and this push for war against Iran is despite the blowback against America that such a war will cause, just as was the case with Iraq twice (and Afghanistan as well). MJ Rosenberg is honest about this and merely wants readers to know the truth. But Dershowitz wants to shut him up.

Another case of intolerance is the attempted prevention of an appearance in San Francisco of a controversial anti-Zionist jazz artist, Gilad Atzmon, by the Israel Lobby, the ADL in particular.

I’ve written many times now on Israel and Zionism, and I’m sure I have lost readers at those times, simply because many people have long-instilled views on Israel and beliefs in myths regarding Israel and Zionism. When bringing up the history of Zionism and the formation of the current state of Israel (which, until 1948, was referred to as “Palestine”), many people just don’t want to hear it. They know what they know, and much of what people know, or think they know, or what they have been told since childhood, is emotion-driven and not rational and not truly informed. For a lot of people, any questioning of their long-held views or of Israel is not to be tolerated. But it is an emotional thing, that’s for sure.

But it is important to question long-held beliefs and challenge assumptions that we may have regarding the things that we were told while growing up, and that we are told by our governments, the media and our leading cultural figures. Regarding Israel, not knowing and understanding the history behind the conflicts and merely holding such beliefs that might be based on distortions and myths and misinformation, is a major contributor to today’s worsening crises. This is why we have allowed our leaders to start wars, and, if the truth were told, the wars have been for no good reason.

One of my favorite articles is Murray Rothbard’s article from 1967, following the Arab-Israeli War, or the “Six Day War” of 1967, in which Rothbard discusses a brief summary of the history of political Zionism. In the article, Rothbard notes that among the several factions of the political Zionists, those who wanted to find and establish a “safe” homeland for Jews, the group that won the final debate were the extremists.

Why should they have been considered “extreme”? Because they insisted on Palestine as the place for Jewish settlement, and would consider no other place in the world. It was to be Palestine, and only Palestine. Not only that, but with the insistence of only Palestine as the new homeland for Jews worldwide and such a territory to be a Jewish State (i.e. a theocracy), and given that, as Rothbard pointed out, the land was not virgin land but was already inhabited by Arabs, the establishment of such a new State had to be one of conquest.

The current state of Israel was the creation by Western governments of an artificial State within a territory that was already inhabited, through coercion, conquest and expulsion of many of the indigenous inhabitants. It was not a formation of a State through voluntary means, not through voluntary contract and voluntary property transfer, not through natural order by any stretch of the imagination. And the way the Israelis have been treating the Palestinians over the past century has been atrocious.

As I have observed before, because of the tremendous amount of propaganda by Western governments, lobbyists, and the media, we have generations of misinformed and stubborn people who do not want to hear the real facts of Israel’s history and of how the Arabs are treated there. Thanks to decades of propaganda and censorship, many people actually believe that “Palestinian” = “terrorist,” or “primitives,” and they do not want to hear otherwise, or, if they hear someone talking about “Palestinians” in any kind of positive way, such talk is dismissed as being “pro-terrorist,” “anti-Israel, or “anti-Jewish.” And again, bringing up the history of the illicit formation of the current state of Israel is taboo, because generations of people know what they know, and they don’t want to hear otherwise.

Murray Rothbard was not one to be known as a “propagandist.” On the contrary, he was very careful with accuracy in his reporting and analyses in economics and history. Rothbard pointed out, regarding the first half of 20th Century Zionism,

Because of the Arabs resident in Palestine, Zionism had to become in practice an ideology of conquest. After World War I, Great Britain seized control of Palestine and used its sovereign power to promote, encourage, and abet the expropriation of Arab lands for Zionist use and for Zionist immigration. Often old Turkish land titles would be dredged up and purchased cheaply, thus expropriating the Arab peasantry on behalf of European Zionist immigration. Into the heart of the peasant and nomadic Arab world of the Middle East there thus came as colonists, and on the backs and on the bayonets of British imperialism, a largely European colonizing people.

(For more on the history of Israel and the way that Arabs have been treated, especially recently, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. There are many more articles to point to, but I just don’t have time to find all of the ones that I know I’ve seen in the past several years now.)

Now, there are the very sensitive Jewish Zionists such as Dershowitz who seem to want to shut people up who have a differing point of view, people such as MJ Rosenberg who are critical of Israel or of Zionism, or who refer to “Israel Firsters.”

And there are those who supposedly support the Palestinians, but, for political reasons, support laws or policies that go against the Palestinians. For example, Barney Frank was quoted to have said that he supports the Palestinians, but didn’t want to offend his voters in his district, in very Jewish (and “limousine liberal”) Brookline and Newton. (“I’m not going to commit political suicide for the sake of the Palestinians…”)

And there are very religious Christians who are Zionists because they believe in the Bible, and want to see “The Jews” flock to Israel, because that kind of scenario seems to please these Christian Zionists. I know, my referring to some of the Christian Zionists as referring to “The Jews” may be in some way obnoxious, yet that is how I perceive many of them in their views toward Jews, unfortunately. Many people are collectivists, and they see others in terms of what particular group they belong to, religiously, ethnically, racially etc. I see such a view of “The Jews” as patronizing, although I’m sure that the many Christian Zionists who seem to have this attitude cannot see that themselves. (Many Christian Zionists do not have that attitude, of course.)

So, personally, regarding the patronizing Christian Zionists, I do not believe that they want Jews to flock to Israel for Jews’ own safety and security. It seems to be more that such a scenario fulfills these Christian Zionists’ Biblically-influenced vision of the world. It is for the sake of the Bible.

But why do Glenn Beck, Michele Bachmann, and Sarah Palin, for example, want me to have to live in Israel just because I’m Jewish? Why is it so important to them to push for the continued gathering of Jews in this one territory that is completely surrounded by Muslims, some (or perhaps many) of whom are hostile toward Jews?

And so I am especially concerned about the particular subgroup within those who are Christian Zionists, the ones who see Israel and the Jews as representing something to do with the “End Times,” “tribulation,” “rapture,” and all that stuff. And some of these people want the current conflicts to continue and escalate, because they really believe that Jesus will return and that “The Jews” will be converted to Christianity, and that we will all be “saved” and so on. And it’s like they want to make it happen.

I don’t think that censoring anti-Zionists is a good idea, because there are many good reasons to oppose Zionism, and instead support freedom, human rights, religious tolerance and diversity, private property, voluntary associations and voluntary contracts. Taking monopolistic, compulsory powers — and armaments — away from government bureaucrats is a good way to start.